Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Postwar Era. A Recent History - Homages to Jack
Tworkov and Claire Falkenstein. The exhibition Postwar Era. A Recent History - Homages to Jack
Tworkov and Claire Falkenstein at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, until April
4, curated by Massimo Luca Barbero
offers a fresh, analytical look at postwar American and
European art through 1979, the year of Peggy Guggenheim death. More than ninety
paintings and sculptures, works, some rarely exhibited, are assembled in clusters
and arranged according to theme, style, affinity, and an unconventional
chronology, bringing together threads of sensibility that go beyond avant-garde
movements and historical tendencies. This context also offers insight into the
work of two artists in the Foundation’s collections: Jack Tworkov (1900–1982)
and Claire Falkenstein (1908–1997).
Above. Mirko – Study for the gates
to the Fosse Ardeatine – 1949 tempera on lined paper.
Curator Luca Massimo Barbero
copyright Jack Tworkow, by SIAE 2016 - courtesy
– Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Jack Tworkov – Abstract Figure
1949 - oil on canvas
Private collection - courtesy of American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich
Private collection - courtesy of American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich
Homage to Jack Tworkov. The exhibition opens with early works of American Abstract
Expressionism. A room is dedicated to the painting of Polish-born American Jack
Tworkov, a prominent figure in the postwar art scene in New York. The rich series of works on paper and five
oil paintings documenting show Tworkov’s treatment of a female portrait in the
stylistic and formal key of Abstract Expressionism.
Curator Jason Andrew and Jack Tworkov’s daughter, an artist
in her own right, Hermine Ford
Robert Motherwell - Personage (Autoportrait)
9 December 1943 - paper collage, gouache, ink on board
In 1943, Motherwell and Jackson
Pollock experimented with collage in response to Peggy’s invitation to
contribute to an exhibition of collage at her Art of This century gallery in
New York. Although Motherwell acknowledged that the work might have elements of
self-portrait, Personage (Autoportrait) is readily perceived as a
non-referential coloristic and spatial construction.
Reg Butler – Walking Woman
1951 – bronze
Dadamaino - The Facts of Life – Letter No. 12
1980 – Indian ink on paper – detail
The same sign is repeated in varied,
spaced, interrupted sequences, as if the work were in constant evolution. The
word “letter” comprises the double meaning of alphabet and missive: it is a
message with political connotation, in the way that Dadamaino intended
“political”: the will to stand for solidarity, freedom and tolerance.
Leslie Thornton – Roundabout
1955 – bronze
“Figures enclosed within structures
or emerging from assemblages reflect the human predicament both playful and
threatening. I did not set up abstract sculpture in opposition to figurative. A
piece of sculpture should be both. Figurative
to the extent that it is a representation of space. The spaces between and around objects and
settings are almost as rich as the objects themselves.”
Leslie Thornton
Carla Accardi – Blue Concentric
1960 – casein on canvas – detail
Color, the dominant element in this
painting, generates a vortex of transparent layers. The vivid blue evokes Accardi’s native
Sicilian landscape, the memory of which permeated her work.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s Philip Rylands
Giuseppe Santomaso - Lettera a Palladio n.6
1977 – oil on canvas
Claire Falkenstein – Set Structure with Cylinders
1944 – poplar wood, stain and pigmented lacquer
Claire Falkenstein’s series titled
Set Structures consists of unified compositions that can be disassembled into
separate parts – “exploding the volume” as she described it, referring to the
fact that the state of the object was altered. The Set Structures were based on
detailed preparatory drawings, above, which led to her first solo exhibition in
New York and to her recognition in a national and international context.
Claire Falkenstein – Entrance gates to the Palazzo
1961 – iron and colored glass
Photograph - The Falkenstein
Foundation - Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC,
New York, NY
Claire
Falkenstein - Model for Garden Gates
1961 - Painted
copper wire and glass
Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston - Gift of Mrs. Peggy Guggenheim
The
homage to Claire Falkenstein is celebrated for her entrance gates to the
museum, commissioned in 1960 by Peggy Guggenheim
for her former home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, they have undergone maintenance prior to this exhibition.
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